Cheney Ups the Ante on Obama

Dick Cheney is not only smart but he is ruthless and is a shrewd politician. Obama is an amateur and not even remotely in Cheney's league, he should have left well-enough alone but opted to embarrass the Bush administration and neuter our intelligence efforts in one fell swoop by releasing the torture memos that, as I noted earlier, are dubious at best.

Here's Cheney:

“One of the things that I find a little bit disturbing about this recent disclosure is they put out the legal memos, the memos that the CIA got from the Office of Legal Counsel, but they didn't put out the memos that showed the success of the effort. And there are reports that show specifically what we gained as a result of this activity. They have not been declassified.”

“I formally asked that they be declassified now. I haven't announced this up until now, I haven't talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country.”

“And I've now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was, as well as to see this debate over the legal opinions.”

Brilliant. Cheney will effectively show that we didn't water board as much as the NY Times said and we gleamed high-level intel that may have saved lives when we did. Hell, even Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said we only water boarded him five times. The left-wing blogosphere repeats the 183-times idiocy as if it were actually possible but I digress..

Most Americans will look at the carnage avoided and admit to themselves that it was worth it to use a method of interrogation that did not injure and did not have long-term effects. In other words, he may well lay the whole farce that Bush sanctioned torture to rest and all because Obama made an egregious error in releasing the memos he did.